Blockchain Insider

by Koh How Tze

If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.

I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it all begins. I’m going to show people what the centralized authority don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without absolute power. A world without manipulated rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. ​A world where anything is possible.

What's Inside The Book

Blockchain, Bitcoin, Money

To explore Blockchain, you need to study bitcoin. To understand bitcoin, you need to know what is money and how it works.

The Name of The Game

If history does repeat itself, you will be amazed by how similar it is the evolution of Blockchain to that of the World Wide Web.

Smart Money

What we have now is truly borderless, programmable money backed by immutable computer systems based on pure logic & mathematics.

Blockchain Insider Content Preview

Excerpts from the book, which will be added from time to time as we progress on the writing.

The Evolution of Money

Blockchain Security

A Tale of Two Worlds

The evolution of money centered around a very important element, trust.

As a human, we find ways to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange values. It is safe to say that the monetary system we are using today (as at the time of writing), is the largest ever trust-based system that we, human being, ever created.

The Evolution of Money, A Trust-based System

Over the course of human history, people find ways to exchange values. Before the concept of money was introduced, we traded among each other, within our own community. Barter trade was good enough for hunter-gatherer age of time. The reciprocal exchange is immediate, not delayed in time.

As societies and trade distant grew, so were the complexity and uncertainties. Our control over trades declined, time and resources are limited, we need the help of intermediaries. Middlemen came into the picture to facilitate our tradings. Instead of direct dealings, we go through different mediums or platforms, just to deliver a product or services across a distance to another party.

A medium of exchange was needed, and the concept of money just came handy. In the early days, there were precious metals like gold, silver, copper etc. to fuel the trades. As civilization evolved, paper money was introduced due to its convenience and better efficiency when compared to precious metals.

Financially, the system evolved as well, and paper money that was once pegged to gold was taken off the standard. Instead of backed by commodity or gold, we are living in a debt based system now.

There is another name for the medium of exchange under such as system, which is fiat money, currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, yet it is not backed by a physical commodity. The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand rather than the value of the material that the money is made of. In other words, trust plays a very important role than ever in the value of a certain currency.

Generally speaking, the paper money is now IOUs, which means that all monies circulating in our monetary system are the debts owed to somebody else.

There are problems. Inflation and deflation. Greed and manipulation.

We need an alternative solution. At the brink of global financial crisis, sometime in 2008-2009, Bitcoin’s white paper was introduced to the world. As they said, the rest is history.

We are now in the transition period of moving from paper money to digital currency.

With technology in place, such as Blockchain, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, IoTs (Internet of Things), we could predict a future where money is not needed anymore as a tool to lower uncertainty in order to facilitate trades or to distribute resources.

A new kind of trust will be implemented, as we are moving towards a moneyless society. Our upcoming generations shall see a moneyless future.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.

Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don’t get paid?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Actually, we’re all like yourself and Dr. Cochrane.

~ Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

While the future remains unknown, it is quite promising.

The article above was extracted from Chapter 1 of the book Blockchain Insider, which is to be published soon.

About Author

I am a writer. I write in both human and computer languages, which (ironically) makes me an author and a programmer.

Koh How Tze

An entrepreneur with a Degree of Bachelor of Engineering (Computer) from UTM, Skudai, Malaysia, had been serving clients from retail and servicing industry since the dinosaur age of the internet. He started his career as a programmer working on Web Based Retail Management System, during an era where people are still using dial-up connections with 56k modem (the fastest that time) to go “online”. He witnesses how the ICT industry and the internet grew from DOS based system to the modern days’ mobile system, to what it is today.

Serving clients from start-ups to MNC throughout his 20 years career path (since 1997), he understands clearly the in and outs of web-based systems, which he advises, consults and integrates for many of his clients. One of the most successful implementation was a retail chain who grew their businesses from 13 outlets to current public listed status with more than 200 outlets across the nation. This is one of the earliest web-based retail management systems in the market, running on open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment. Another system development and implementation using similar framework were for a coach company, with hundreds of tickets issued daily through an online ticketing system. Many can be added but to cut a long story short, they are all customised software solutions.

From ICT system development and integration, he went into consultation and currently moved into the digital media landscape. He is betting the future on this sunrise industry with strong confidence in Malaysia’s rich cultural heritage and multi-ethnics resources.

He is currently a digital media strategist, specialized in transmedia content marketing.